From the mountains and the valleys, they came to Texas for a new start, for freedom and for liberty. They didn’t settle for anything less. From the Great Smoky Mountains, a young Tennessean hunter came west in search of personal freedom. What he got was so much more.
After meeting a struggling family of foreigners, David helps them along and their eldest son helps himself to the fresh meat. They share each other’s bodies and make each other’s Christmas truly meaningful, even though the threat death by a renegade Comanche war party.
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Frozen Prairie
Copyright © 2011 Kelly Jacobs
ISBN: 978-1-55487-881-9
Cover art by Angela Waters
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
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Smashwords Edition
Frozen Prairie
By
Kelly Jacobs
Dedication
To the men of the Alamo, to Sam Houston and to all those brave enough to not take orders.
Chapter 1
As the sights on his rifle lined up to perfection, David eyed his target. The scrawny deer was maybe forty or fifty yards away. As his finger gently pressed down on the trigger, the flint leapt to the frizzen and the heavy forty caliber lead ball jumped to its target.
David lowered his muzzle-loader to spot the deer and saw it run a few yards, then drop. The vultures jumped immediately into action. That wouldn’t do. He had walked for five miles to spot a deer and he wasn’t going to let a buzzard have his dinner.
David started running with a mad dash to the food that lay on the ground. As soon as he had the deer in sight, a big black buzzard landed down near the carcass. It spread its wings, lowered its head and gave a sour hiss. David used his backup plan. He pulled out his knife and stared in outrage at the buzzard looming on his future meal.
With arms flailing and a yell like a madman that he would be embarrassed to perform in public, David charged at the buzzard. They were evidently terrified at the reaction, both the maker and the receiver.
Before David could get near the buzzard, the old bird hopped away across the short grass, looking as though his pride was damaged and his mind was baffled.
David stopped at the carcass, huffing for breath and probably more shocked than the buzzard. After the surprise of the situation wore thin, he set to camp. He whistled for his horse, who didn’t come. It wasn’t that the horse wasn’t there, it was just that the horse was either deaf or apathetic. David wasn’t sure which.
The gray mare stood, waiting patiently, for David to be done with fooling around and take her back to the tent for some grain and salt. He picked up the deer carcass by its hind legs and carried it back to the horse.
After David tossed the carcass across the blanket and leather pad, which he used in place of a legitimate saddle, he set off for his temporary home. It was just a small log cabin fifty miles south of Waco, in a stretch of homesteads.
He had purchased a few hundred acres after trading away an Indian trade musket and handing over a few silver pesos to make up the difference on the bill, and had plans to start a small farm. He lived off the land and was mostly self-sufficient. He hoped to start peddling his trade as a carpenter in the future, managing to get a few extra dollars when he needed it.
His rifle was the only thing he had to protect himself. If he had the money, he would have gotten another rifle, but in the republic, money was the rarest of all luxuries.
His linen and wool clothing had worn out long ago, the work of thorn bushes, hard falls and other such knocks had taken away the fabric piece by piece. He had replaced the articles with bucked deer hides cut close to the way his old clothes had looked, only with fringe at every seam.
The buckskins, somewhat similar to his old clothing, lacked the familiar appearance. He wore moccasins that he learned to make from a Caddo farmer, who he thanked with a deer carcass. Shoes were hard to get on the frontier and boots were unheard of.
His body was young, trim and hard with tough muscle, due to the harsh environment that surrounded him. He had grown up in a hard world, but in the smile he often wore and the warmth within his mind, was his resistance to the cold and unfeeling world.
Through the woods and bushes, David made his way to the cabin he’d set up. He hadn’t been robbed yet, but with an influx of new and strange people in Texas, he kept close to camp. A small wagon, a pair of Mexican burros, and two horses made up the rest of his major possessions.
A hunter from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, David had set out to settle a small swatch of land and eventually send his family news that they had a new parcel of land to clear and farm. But even if it was a justifiable and honorable lot in life, it wasn’t what he wanted.
David longed to explore the deep wilds of the distant frontier and see all that the new world had to offer. He had heard tale of a mountain stretch that had bears twice as tall as a man and with claws the size of daggers. He had also heard of buffalo herds up north in the Black Prairie that spread so far across the earth that the grass was enveloped in a solid black blanket of wooly bulls and cows.
His heart was full of wanderlust, but he knew that his chance to be part of the new Texas was yet to come. He was a foreigner in a strange land, a far sight from America. He was an illegal immigrant in land Mexico still thought they owned, but luckily, Mexico really didn’t care. The Comanche and the high society of Mexico City kept the elite of the Mexican empire busy enough where he was safe from the end of a bayonet, or so he thought.
David neared his camp, saw his white canvas tent and hobbled burros. He smiled at the feeling that there was at least a tiny refuge for him in a terrifying land of Comanche raids and near constant war.
As David started on his journey to Texas, he crossed paths with the Comanche only once, and it was enough. As he rode along the prairie, he recalled the happening as if it were only yesterday.
An old slave had gone with his master, an inept thrill seeker, in the soulless land of north Texas. The Comanche had tortured the slaveholder to death and decided to sell the slave to smugglers, but the old gentleman escaped when the Comanche were asleep and made his way blindly in the night toward the nearest light he saw.
David had never been so alarmed in his life at the sight of the terrified man who begged for protection. The five Comanche came within one hundred yards of the tent before a ball from David’s rifle plowed a hole into the skull of a screeching warrior and sent him on a short ride to the dirt below.
The Comanche didn’t want the slave to escape. Slaves were walking money to them. They rode full speed to the tent, hoping to kill David before he could reload his rifle. They didn’t know that David was the fastest loader in his county, nor did they know about David’s pistols.
The Comanche screamed at him as they came toward him, arrows flying through the air like lightning bolts. David tossed the rifle and his bag to the slave and ordered him to load it.
David took aim with one pistol and sent another Comanche to the ground. As he unloaded his second pistol, the old man handed back the rifle and, in due course, David killed another before he could be killed.
The final two Comanche came at David and he did the only thing he could do, he charged them. As the old slave pulled the trigger of the last loaded pistol, the ball hit the other Comanche in the chest.
After taking an arrow in the shoulder and a blow from a tomahawk to his back, David dragged the last warrior off his horse. David’s knife dug into the Comanche and slit him from lungs to hips.
The five Comanche, who meant to kill David and sell the old man, were dead or dying. David had just ended the lives of those men and the immediate sense of need to fight wore away quickly. The humanity in him came out as his heart began a slow, rattling beat in his chest.
His hands grew cold and the world seemed to crawl around him. David vomited and his body shook in a sense of self-disgust. After he vomited a second time, his mind went blank and dull.
If he hadn’t had killed the Comanche, they would have killed him, but that didn’t make the reality any easier to accept. Humans weren’t supposed to hurt each other, at least that’s the way it was back in civilization.
The slave introduced himself as Isaac and from a little knowledge that he saved from when a friend was hurt by a wild hog, stitched up David’s shoulder and back with hairs from the tail of David’s horse. David thanked Isaac and Isaac returned grateful words.
In the morning, after taking a rest and getting what they could from the dead Comanche, David did some fast thinking. He drew up false papers of freedom and claimed Isaac as his own property. He then set Isaac free with a pistol, a horse and a point in the direction of a small band of Caddo who were friendly and hospitable.
Isaac took his leave and David set up camp farther into the southern woods. After he set up camp anew and settled down for the night, he cried. David cried for Isaac, for the Comanche, for himself and for the world. He had never ended the life of another human being before and he felt the worst feeling a man can feel, a feeling of emptiness, that life was pointless.
For three days straight, David didn’t eat or drink. He tended his horses and every so often broke into tears.
Even if David was injured, scared and broken, he had learned important lessons that day. He promised himself to buy another pistol and even another Indian trade musket, if he could lay his hands on one.
That was the night David realized what it meant to be alone and helpless in the world and as he rode along, passing his neighbor’s cabin and nearing his own tent, he hoped that he would never see another Comanche for as long as he lived.
Most of the Texans didn’t even have a gun, but from their fathers and brothers, sisters and mothers, they all knew how to use one. David was a rich man compared to the bulk of his fellow Texans. He had long guns, pistols and livestock, not to mention he could read and write.
Of all the things he knew about this scary, wild land he was in, he knew that he had to get to his parcel of land and do with it what he could.
After two and a half hours of riding cautiously through the bushes and thorns, David arrived home and saw the primitive beauty of it. A stretch of a stream ran through a corner of it and a big clearing of tall grass was right in the middle. A stand of tall, semi-straight trees stood to the west.
He would be expected to share it all, the water, nature’s gift of game and good land, with his neighbors. If they were to survive in this barren land, they would have to work together. There was nothing wrong with sharing and he welcomed the sight of people, unlike the Comanche, who didn’t set up out to slip a knife into his throat and saw him open to bleed.
In a week of hard work, David strained to build a log cabin, which was as big as nature would allow, only thirteen by twenty feet. He made a crude corral of sticks and logs. The doorway to his new standing was claimed from a deer hide tacked to the top of the makeshift doorframe with the hard wood of a pine knot he whittled down to nail shaped splinters.
Through chores and good graces, he helped his new neighbors set up their own camps and claims. A Wichita tribe couple moved down south and lied about their race to get citizenship and a Canadian family of twelve was to his northwest. To the government of the Republic, the Indians weren’t citizens, let alone human beings.
David had only been there a week, more than his neighbors on the land, but he was still the one there first and he could shoot, so he was the old man of the place, regardless of his age of twenty years.
David had an agreement with his neighbors to help each other and care for his property, using it as they needed, so that he could go to San Antonio and trade hides.
That happening with the Comanche was some time ago and since then, Texas had declared independence from the Mexican empire. The new Republic of Texas, which was made up of men who were mere farmers and land speculators, was on the verge of war with the old empire.
* * * *
The uncovered wagon, which the German immigrant had traded his father’s finest Jaeger rifle for, was a ramshackle rig that barely supported the weight upon its wobbling wheels. Rather than be forced into a war in his native Germany, of which there were plenty to go around, Bill and his siblings decided they would have none of the forced militarism and headed for the land grants of Texas.
Bill navigated as best he could along the slightly worn dirt tracks of the wagons that came before him. He had only been in the country for a fortnight, but had already learned a few scattered words in English. Regardless of the rattlesnakes, the heat and the possibility of Wichita Indian arrows, it was still a better sight than the three months at sea in a ship’s dark and stinking hull.
Bill’s family consisted of his parents, his little brothers and sisters who had been sent to the relative safety of Texas, and away from the rebellions throughout Europe on their parent’s orders.
All of the Westphalia, Germany natives were afraid in the new land, but kept in a constant state of shaky optimism. They had never been rich, but still carried themselves with an air of dignity that was becoming scarce, even among the blue blooded.
After they landed in Galveston and traded their European money for American silver dollars, Spanish doubloons and some Mexican Pesos, they set to work on the plan that they had formulated from the beginning.
A small stretch of one hundred and sixty acres was waiting for them northeast of Bexar. Bill’s aging father had planned to take what savings he and Bill had made from the iron works in Westphalia and start a new life in the free land of Texas, using the land they bought from the Republic via overseas mail.